Why we should fall a little bit in love with Sally Bercow

Ever drunk more than one bottle of wine? Had a one night stand? Not if you’re a Labour politician standing for a seat in Pimloco you haven’t. Except Sally Bercow has, and she doesn’t seem afraid to admit it.

Anne McElvoy deserves full praise for an exceptional interview with Sally Bercow in yesterday’s London Evening Standard, where she gets the Sally Bercow to frankly discuss politics and past misdemeanours.

It’s not that she’s married to a Conservative speaker and willing to trash the party, we’ve all gotten used to that. It’s that she actually seems to be refreshingly human. Speaking as young person, it’s brilliant to hear politicians admit to making a mistake (lying on her CV) or just behaving a little big outrageously.
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Julie Bindel does transphobia again

Julie Bindel is wrong again. She was wrong in 2004 when she said that “I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women” and she’s shockingly wrong in a recent article for Standpoint mag that I can only describe as hideously transphobic.

There’s a lot in this article to take issue with. Other bloggers, such as cave of rationality have discussed it from a human rights perspective, specifically the human rights that she fails to apply to trans-gendered people.

I want to examine it through her discussion of biology as destiny, when she says:

transsexualism, by its nature, promotes the idea that it is “natural” for boys to play with guns and girls to play with Barbie dolls. The idea that gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed is the antithesis of feminism.

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Late term abortions ruling could be alarming

The Information Commissioner’s ruling on Friday to release statistics on late term abortions carried out because of disability has alarming implications.

The figures were requested under FOI by the ProLife Alliance, and the case has already led to an op-ed in the Telegraph calling for “an open debate on the merits of late term abortion” once the numbers are out.

It’s clear that the potential for this information to be misused to promote an anti-choice agenda and to restrict women’s reproductive freedom is strong. The Telegraph state within their editorial that concerns over the identification of women and their doctors are “spurious”. They suggest that when the statistics were previously available, up until 2002, no one was harmed.

However, they fail to acknowledge the Jepson case, where a legal challenge was mounted against doctors who performed a late term abortion for a fetus with a cleft palate, and the area and hospital in which the doctors were working were identified by police and local papers.

The “deeply worrying” issue of identification of doctors who perform late term abortions as a result of the information being public was raised in a joint statement by Brook and the Family Planning Association.

There’s clearly a tension here between the public’s right to access information and the potential for statistics to be misused to promote a harmful agenda. If the Department of Health do not challenge the ruling in the High Court, and the information becomes public, there are clear ways to respond and mount a defence.

Instead of accepting a narrative of late-term abortions being carried out to “ensure that ‘designer babies’ are being born” (thank you, The Telegraph, for that excellent turn of phrase) we need to deconstruct these claims.

Rather than abortions being carried out for ‘cleft palates’ a facial disability which can be corrected by surgery, we can point out the huge number of disabilities and birth defects associated with clefting, which may only be part of the story.

We can also support medical professionals who perform abortions at late stages, and voice our support for women in the UK to have full access to reproductive freedom.

Blogs “highest form of political journalism”?

… and other things that came out of the debate on politics, journalism and the general election held at City University last night.

The panel, including Sam Coates, The Times’s Chief Political Correspondent, Steve Richards, Commentator for the Independent and Pippa Crerar, political correspondent for the Evening Standard discussed topics including the Sun’s defection from Labour to the Tories (which was seen as having little impact) , blogging, youtube and the BNP.

Sam Coates, despite dismissing twitter’s role in campaigning with the whimsical “please, god, no more twitter” said that blogs would have far more influence in the next general election and could potentially become the “highest form of political journalism.”

Steve Richards announced that the next general election would be “the election of the internet” with coverage being far more web-based.

He argued that the internet had the potential to derail carefully co-ordinated general election campaigns, suggesting that if a candidate were to say something off message “it will be on YouTube within 10 minutes.”

Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time was also criticised by Richards who suggested that the format was too easy for him.

One of the most interesting points made in the debate was about Gordon Brown and the future of the Labour party.

He was amusingly described by Richards as a combination between a “lofty academic and a deranged journalist” who constantlyover-analyses the media impact of his actions (see biscuitgate)

All three panellists predicted a swing towards the conservatives, and Crerar suggested that it would make very little difference to Labour’s prospects in the general election if Gordon Brown stayed on as a leader or not.

Cameron’s Euroscepticism was also briefly discussed, with Richards suggesting that this was too easily dismissed as a pragmatic response to the traditional Euro-phones within the Conservative party, and actually represented one of the Conservative leader’s few genuine convictions.